Cancel Culture

Time to Cancel the ‘Cancel Culture’

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In case you missed it (ICYMI, as they say), “cancel culture” is the term used by the self-anointed “woke” for boycotting—essentially turning into non-persons and erasing from public life—people (usually celebrities, but plebes aren’t exempt) who have exhibited what they deem questionable behavior or written something untoward on social media.

It’s our version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Being blocked on Twitter is the equivalent of being marched around on a stool while wearing a dunce cap.

Ellen DeGeneres was nearly canceled for hobnobbing with former President George W. Bush in October 2019.

The latest target of this despicable trend is the actor Vincent Vaughn, who was caught (on video, no less) chatting and shaking hands (!) with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump at a football game on Jan. 13.

A man named (sorry, I never heard of him before) Timothy Burke wrote on Twitter, “I’m very sorry to have to share this video with you. All of it, every part of it.”

The usual Twitter madness transpired with much back and forth, most attempting to cancel Vaughn. I doubt the actor cared, at least I hope not. He’s a gifted man with a great sense of humor.

But note Burke’s use of the word “sorry”— and mine. Neither of us are. We’re lying.

If Burke were “very sorry,” he would never have posted a virtually silent—you can’t hear a word of what anyone’s saying—video of anything so trivial as an actor chatting with the president. Burke clearly wanted to “get” Vaughn, the scoundrel who supported Rand Paul for president and is well-known to lean libertarian, making him a renegade in Hollywood and therefore not sufficiently “woke.”

As for me, I used the fake “sorry” because I find Burke’s behavior so execrable that I want to give him the pain of anonymity, a severe punishment in today’s world. Evidently, he’s a sports writer.

So I’m part of the “cancel culture,” too. It’s everywhere.

You could even say the impeachment is an attempt to “cancel” Trump, rather than just removing him from office. They want to obliterate him from our consciousness.

Commenting about Burke, Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy elaborated on just how extreme things have gotten. “Unless America talks to the other side and we can just talk to each other, this is going to be a country—they might as well split the country right in half, right down the Mississippi,” Doocy said.

I say—enough already. Let’s cancel the cancel culture.

But don’t ask me how. Under present conditions, with the relentless antagonism on social media and the zeitgeist in general, curing cancer may be a walk in the proverbial park by comparison.

 

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Corporate Culture

3 Ways to Discern a Company’s Culture From the Outside in 2020

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The difference between a great corporate culture and a mediocre culture is the same as the difference between shoes that fit and shoes that don’t. With both, for a while, you can deal with the discomfort. But eventually, the discomfort becomes frustration, and frustration becomes pain. Just like painful footwear, a painful working environment will not support you to reach your desired destination.

Here are three things you can do in the coming year to ensure that you land in an environment that will be purposeful, positive, and productive for you, both professionally and personally:

Choose the company that stands for something bigger.

Demand for transparent, socially conscious brands will only get stronger. Sooner or later, every company will be forced into meaningful disclosure about the core beliefs driving its profitability. Employees want to work for admirable corporations. Consumers want their purchases to mean something. The companies that will dominate the marketplace in the future will be led by executive teams that thoughtfully, wisely choose to stand for (and genuinely support) something bigger than their own products and services.

Differentiate between values-driven and values-as-afterthought.

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Museum

Free Museum Day Returns to SoCal on Jan. 25; Here’s a Full List of Over 45 Participating Institutions

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Clear your calendar for Saturday, Jan. 25.

That’s the date when more than 45 museums throughout Southern California will waive the cost of admission for the entire day.

The annual free museum day event, now in its 15th year, offers children and adults alike the opportunity to experience a wide variety of the region’s cultural institutions without paying a penny to get in.

“It’s a great chance to revisit old favorites or discover something new,” Jennifer Caballero, the president of SoCal Museums and marking director at the Skirball Cultural Center, said in a news release. “I’m always impressed by the range of cultural offerings. From cars to Cold War artifacts to modern art, there’s something for everyone.”

The offer only applies to general admission; it does not include ticketed exhibit, with the exception of The Broad’s “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again.” Normal parking costs also won’t be waived.

This year’s participants include the Autry Museum of the American West, the Cayton Children’s Museum, Descanso Gardens, LACMA and MOCA.

Some of the museums of the list — such as the Getty Center, the Getty Villa and The Broad — do not charge admission year round. Others have select days where you can visit for free.

Select institutions require you to reserve tickets in advance.

Here’s a full list of the participating museums:

 

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Artist Painting

Burning Man’s Spectacular Art on Display at Oakland Museum

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Inside the largest gallery at the Oakland Museum of California, fleeting desert mirages have been captured and held in stasis for all to see — without the pesky dust storms and sunburn that are usually involved with Burning Man.

Here, in a climate-controlled museum environment, a massive, fringed, gold-leaf-trimmed arch — made of mere paper and printed with faces, cats, giraffes and eyes — soars to the ceiling. Tiny peepholes in its legs lead to inner worlds of spiders, dolls and whatever the heck those things are in there. Steps away, a converted bus becomes a rolling, open-air movie theater complete with marquee, large screen playing old-timey flicks, a platform of seats and even a lobby with a vintage candy counter. Nearby, giant mushrooms loom and morph in color and shape before your eyes — no magic fungi needed, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

This is “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” a playful exhibition of touchable, climbable, even huggable creations that usually only appear at the annual spectacle of maker machinations in the Nevada desert, destined to disappear into the ether. Even here, they’ll only be on view through Feb. 16.

“The idea was to share a taste of the creativity and radical self-expression that happens at Burning Man, especially with so many of the artists and makers who come from right here in the Bay Area, ” says Lori Fogarty, OMCA’s director, who is now a burner herself. She went to the festival for the first time last year — for research, of course.

“But even beyond that local connection, the principles of Burning Man — like inclusion, participation, civic responsibility — resonated with our ideals here at the museum,” Fogarty says. “We’d thought about doing a Burning Man show for a long time, then we heard about this great show from the Smithsonian and wanted to bring it here.”

Yes, the Smithsonian. The same venerable national museum known for treasured relics like Lincoln’s stove-pipe hat and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, originated the exhibition in its Renwick Gallery, thanks to lead curator Nora Atkinson. Oakland marks the show’s West Coast debut and final stop on a national tour.And no matter what you think of Burning Man — which began as a small counterculture gathering at San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 and has swelled into what some consider one of the world’s most influential cultural events and others write off as a gentrified bacchanal — no one can deny the otherworldly, often dreamlike and absolutely awesome art installations, sculptures and mutant vehicles that rise each year in the dust of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Bringing such works into a museum setting was indeed “a heavy lift,” Fogarty says, in more ways than one. While displays of costumes, jewelry and photos are easily managed, most of the art installations are huge and built by teams of art collectives.

Some are actually from the desert playa, such as Mill Valley resident Marco Cochrane’s graceful “Truth is Beauty” steel-mesh sculpture of a nude dancer. Others were commissioned for the Oakland exhibition, such as the 40-foot-tall “Temple of Reunion” by Petaluma sculptor David Best and the Temple Crew. It’s so large, it had to be constructed outside in the museum’s garden courtyard.

Reminiscent of the elaborate, intricate structures Best annually creates at Burning Man, the temple is designed to be a quiet, sacred place of reflection and remembrance. Visitors are encouraged to write on it or tie things to it. On the playa, such a structure would be burned in a cathartic ritual at the end of the festival, sending those messages out to the universe. Can’t quite get away with that at a museum.

“David built a temple for the Renwick as well,” Atkinson says. “And in our historic building, we have to fire retard everything to high heaven. So he came up with the idea to have people write little messages on small blocks of wood to be sent out to Burning Man. We delivered several pallets of them this year and they were burned with his temple on the playa.”

As you enter OMCA’s gallery and view wild costumes like “Thorax: Ambassador of the Insects” by Oregon artist Tyler FuQya, calming tones reverberate from a sound installation of mechanized Indonesian gongs by Aaron Taylor Kuffner. In a far corner of the Grand Hall, a huge kaleidoscope star sparkles against the dark ceiling. From Oakland’s Christopher Schardt, it’s “Nova,” a canopy of programmable LED lights that dance to classical music.

Rachel Sadd, best known in the Oakland arts community as Rachel McCrafty, created an interactive piece for the exhibit called the “Gift-o-Matic,” exploring what it means to give and receive. It’s basically a big gumball machine. On one side of the big glass box, people can make gifts, like little beaded bracelets or even “a good idea shared,” then put the gift in a little plastic ball and insert it into the machine. On the other side, another ball pops out and you receive a little present from someone else.

 

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Military

Why Threats Against Iranian Cultural Sites Threaten Humanity

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On Jan. 4 President Trump created an international uproar when he first suggested that Iranian cultural sites were legitimate military targets. “They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way,” he told reporters on Air Force One the following day.

The response to those comments was surprisingly encouraging. Not only did preservationists, historians and international law experts express outrage – including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director and CEO calling such threats “abhorrent to the collective values of our society” — but there was significant criticism from across the political spectrum, including from some of the President’s strongest supporters. “We’re not at war with the culture of the Iranian people,” Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Monday.

On one level, this outcry in support of protecting cultural heritage suggests that a majority of people recognize, almost intuitively, that a historic temple is never just a historic temple. Iran is home to countless incomparable sites, including 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, such as the ancient city of Persepolis and the Masjed-e Jāmé (“Friday Mosque”), each of which contributes to the identity of the Iranian people. To imply such sites are targets is a wider act of aggression. Indeed, throughout history, threatening to eradicate a group or a nation’s culture has almost always been about something more – namely, about eradicating people themselves. Cultural destruction has forever been part and parcel of ethnic cleansing. In 2001, when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas —two 6thcentury statues, each well over 100 feet tall, carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan — the reasoning given by the militant group was that the statues “have been gods of the infidels.” The fact is that the destruction was part of a much larger campaign to eliminate the region’s Hazara ethnic minority, for which the statues were of irreplaceable religious significance.

The destruction of cultural sites — from libraries to places of worship to museums — is ultimately about erasing a people’s entire history. During the Bosnian war in the early 1990s, Serb and Croat forces destroyed or damaged hundreds of mosques in their efforts to rid the region of Muslims. In Zvornik, which had been a historic Muslim trading post on the Drina River, so many traces of the town’s past had been eliminated that Brano Grujic, the Serb-installed mayor there, could falsely boast in 1993 that “there were never any mosques in Zvornik.” As Helen Walasek, the author of Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage, writes, sites such as archives and museums were targeted in part because they reflected Bosnia’s pluralistic past. Such attacks were aimed at “eradicating any trace of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s historic diversity and traditions of coexistence.”

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Corporate Culture

How Corporate Cultures Differ Around the World

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Culture can be a powerful lever for maintaining, renewing, and shaping an organization’s viability. While global teams can provide cost savings and help firms access talent from around the world, cultural differences and divergent expectations around workplace norms can be sources of friction. That’s why it’s so important to understand how cultures tend to differ around the world.

Building upon the integrated culture framework we presented in “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture”, we launched an online assessment to allow HBR readers to explore their own organizations’ cultural profiles. We received over 12,800 responses from across the globe between December 2017 and May 2019.

The assessment gave us a window into HBR readers’ organizational cultures: the shared, pervasive, enduring, and implicit behaviors and norms that permeate an organization (rather than individual employees’ own culture styles). For each respondent’s organization, we examined the relative rankings of eight distinct culture styles that map onto two dimensions: how people respond to change (flexibility versus stability) and how people interact (independence versus interdependence).

A few patterns emerged across the full sample of responses: Caring and results were the most salient culture attributes across respondents’ organizations, reflecting an orientation toward collaboration and achievement in the workplace. Meanwhile, authority and enjoyment ranked lowest overall, indicating that decisiveness and spontaneity were lower priorities.

Cultures can exist on many different levels. Within organizations, variations in culture can be found by functional area or even by work group. More broadly, patterns in behavioral norms and values can also exist at the national or regional level. Prior research has shown how culture varies across countries in systematic ways.

HBR’s readers provided a great global lens through which to examine organizational cultures across regions. We received survey responses from around the world, with 43% of responses coming from readers outside North America. In this global sample, some patterns were remarkably consistent across regions: On average, caring ranked highly across all regions, while authority ranked among the least salient culture attributes. However, when we examined whether certain culture styles were more heavily represented in specific regions, some interesting differences came to light.

How people respond to change. First, we examined the culture attributes that explain how people respond to change (more specifically, organizations’ tendencies toward stability versus flexibility). We found that organizations in Africa exhibited substantial flexibility. Many organizations in this region were characterized by learning and purpose, indicating an openness toward change through innovation, agility, and an appreciation for diversity. In contrast, many firms in Eastern Europe and the Middle East were characterized by a strong degree of stability. An emphasis on safety was prevalent in these regions, revealing the prioritization of preparedness and business continuity. Particularly in the Middle East, we found many firms in which authority ranked highly.

How people interact. Second, we analyzed how people interact with one another. In other words, we examined whether people are inclined toward independence or toward interdependence. Firms in Western Europe and in North and South America leaned toward a high level of independence; however, this tendency manifested itself in different ways. Western European and North American firms exhibited an especially strong emphasis on results, goal-orientation, and achievement. Relative to other regions, enjoyment ranked highly in South America, reflecting a propensity toward fun, excitement, and a light-hearted work environment. On the other hand, firms in Asia, Australia and New Zealand were more likely to be characterized by interdependence and coordination. In these regions, we found workplaces that embodied caring, and a sense of safety and planning. Particularly in Asia, we found many firms that emphasized order through a cooperative, respectful, and rule-abiding culture.

The external environment can shape the cultures of the organizations in which we work, but we all have our own individual work styles. It can be informative to take stock of how our own work styles mirror or differ from regional culture patterns, especially when considering how our behaviors and actions will be perceived by others. For example, taking the initiative to update standard operating procedures to implement a new software package might be applauded in a region where learning and agility are valued, but might be met with frustration in a region that emphasizes order and consistency.

Furthermore, with the increasing prevalence of telecommuting, freelancing, and contract work, it is becoming ever more common to work with others across regional boundaries. Recognizing that fellow team members may be coming from regions where norms and behavioral patterns differ from our own is critical when communicating and collaborating with a diverse work team.

 

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Lawyer

Top GOP lawyer: Attacking Iranian Cultural Sites would Breach Hague Cultural Property Convention

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A leading Republican lawyer warned that President Trump’s threat to target Iranian cultural sites would be a violation of an international treaty.

John Bellinger III, who was the legal adviser for the State Department under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009, said in a Sunday Lawfare article that although bombing cultural sites would not constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute, it would violate the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

The Senate approved the convention, which was supported by the Bush administration, in September 2008. At the time, Bellinger testified before Congress about its passage and said that it was in line with America’s longstanding practice of not attacking cultural sites.

“We have concluded that U.S. practice is entirely consistent with this convention and that ratifying it will cause no problems for the United States or for the conduct of U.S. military operations,” Bellinger testified.

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Native American Art

Commentary: Native American Art And Culture Deserve A Fresh Look

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I attended an inspiring and educational talk titled “Mound City–The Place of the Indian Past and Present in St. Louis” given by Professor Patricia Cleary at The Missouri History Museum. Professor Cleary referred to the ground under the museum as the place where the indigenous Mississippian culture lived and thrived almost a thousand years ago. She went on to talk about the need to pay homage and give respect to those ancient peoples and their descendants in our city today.

A week later I found myself at the Nasher Museum on the campus of Duke University in North Carolina where I was inspired again by the special exhibition “Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices,1950s to Now.” Sarah Schroth, the director of the museum, also referred to the land in and around the museum as having belonged to the Native Peoples of North Carolina and said, “By presenting, ‘Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices’ and its related programs, we are taking the first steps towards acknowledging those who were here first and who are still here.”

The Nasher exhibition is the first to chart the development of contemporary indigenous art in the United States and Canada. For generations, Native North American artists have exhibited work mostly outside the mainstream art institutions. “Native Voices” begins to remedy that division, presenting approximately 60 works of art in a wide variety of media by Native American artists from many nations and regions.

The wall texts are equally as inspiring as the works themselves. I’ve decided to quote some of the artists’ thoughts and feelings.

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Pop Culture

Best Pop Culture Moments From 2000, 20 Years Later

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When I hear certain songs from the year 2000, I am right back in my pre-teen bedroom lying on the floor looking up at my sky-blue walls (12-year-old me did not know this, but cerulean blue was the Pantone colour of the year in 2000, so your girl was on trend). I’d roll over only to press skip on my CD player to get to Aaliyah’s “Try Again” on the Romeo Must Die soundtrack.
That was the most 2000 sentence, ever.
As soon as Timbaland’s soothing voice kicks in with, “without a dope beat to step to, step to, step to,” I am 12 again, singing along while flipping through the pages of my soon-to-be favourite book (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) and wearing my knockoff Juicy Couture velour tracksuit (from Stitches, of course). OK, that was the most 2000 sentence ever.
The year 2000 wasn’t just instrumental in skyrocketing my boy-band obsession, strengthening my affinity for celebrity gossip through the pages of CosmoGirl (or Seventeen, or Bop, or Teen People, RIP teen mags of my youth), and defining my future music tastes. It was a transformative year in entertainment — we got the first illegal music streaming service in Napster, the origin story of Netflix and Google Images. The year 2000 shifted us into a digital future all those ’80s movies predicted — minus the flying cars. The computers around the world didn’t crash as the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999, but change did come.
Mikado Sticks

10 notable developments in Seattle’s arts and culture scene in the 2010s

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Some of you aren’t crazy about lists for perfectly understandable reasons: Lists can be arbitrary; they can oversimplify. But they also have their uses.

In her 2013 essay, “The Listicle as Literary Form,” linguist Arika Okrent compared listicles to limericks and haiku: tiny, predictable packets of words that people simply enjoy. “Lists may not lead us to deeper understanding of the world,” Okrent wrote, “but they give us the reassuring sense that understanding is at least possible.”

So, in that spirit, here are a few memorable things that happened in the Seattle arts and culture world in the past decade.

1. Seattle Art Fair: A cultural initiative by the late Paul Allen, Seattle Art Fair debuted in Aug. 2015 and did its job as catalyst — the fair brought international, jet-set galleries and buyers to town, but also inspired/provoked the satellite fair, Out of Sight. The local-centric Out of Sight was both a serious retort to the mainstream fair (the art was great) and a carnival of cheekiness (it had BMX stunt bikers). Both gave the Seattle scene a new sense of ballast, a new center of gravity.

2. The “Mikado” affair: In 2014, the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society staged “The Mikado” with actors in yellowface — white people playing Japanese characters — and were stunned by the blowback. The Japanese American Citizens League showed up to protest, columns were written and the story went national, kindling a much-needed bonfire of conversation about race and representation. Those conversations had been simmering quietly for years, and in discrete corners, but “The Mikado” opened a vent, allowing pent-up energy into the mainstream. Suddenly, questions of power in the arts — who gets heard, who gets the limelight and, more importantly, who gets to act as gatekeepers — seemed to be on everybody’s lips.

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